Isn't it sad, how this has all transpired? I seem to remember reading someplace, that Sun had spent something like $400M on Solaris x86. They thought, at one point, that they would displace the desktop titans in the arena.

I installed the originally licensed Solaris 10 when it first came out. I liked it, but at the same time I realized that it wasn't going to significantly move mind share for the desktop. People are too much drones, and those big slabs of skin hanging on their faces act as blinders ... making them Inherently incapable of escaping monopoly. But I digress...

I see the Ilumos project, and a couple other offshoots, trying to make some constructive use of $400M worth of technology. Since Sun wasn't the government, that expense shouldn't be wasted. I hope Oracle is making good use of it.

Now, my question: The ilumos project makes mention of "closed source pieces" - that are necessary for compilation. Are these legally available anywhere? If not, then ... sheeshhh ... what a waste!

I had the Sun Developer Studio that originally shipped with Solaris 10, but somehow managed to trash the CDs. I suppose the closed source bits were on them. Oh well.

If I'm not mistaken, the money you are speaking about was $500 million that Sun spent in development of Solaris 10 - not x86 for the desktop.

About the "closed sources" you mention, I'm sure that is code originally licensed from AT&T Unix code and now owned by Oracle. I don't have any specifics, but BSD went through the same thing in the early 90s and because of the lawsuit, they ended up rewriting AT&T code. This is presumably what illumos will do with their code, or they might take BSD code and use it modified or unmodified.

SmartOS is a great illumos distribution if all you want is a hypervisor. A number of former Sun employees are now working for Joyent, who created SmartOS, such as Bryan Cantrill and Brendan Gregg.